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Tony Munroe
MASSACHUSSETTS, JULY 19: The US Coast Guard has declared that there was virtually no hope of finding John F Kennedy Jr, his wife and sister-in-law alive after the Friday crash of the plane the son of the assassinated president was flying.
The news came as Coast Guard Rear Admiral Richard Larrabee announced last night that efforts would shift from a `search and rescue' operation to an effort to recover wreckage of the light plane that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard.
``I have talked to all of the families,'' Larrabee said, adding, ``It was a difficult phone call for me and I'm sure it was much more difficult for them. They have all been very gracious and very appreciative over the last two days. They thanked me and thanked all of the people who were involved. It was just a very difficult phone call.''
``We're in the business of saving lives and anytime I have to do something like this is very difficult.''
He added, ``This is not the result we were looking for and it wasn't theresult that we hoped for yesterday, but I will tell you that we did everything we possibly could to find survivors from this incident and I think the conclusion we came to tonight, as difficult as it was, is the right position to be in.''
The announcement ended a weekend of waiting on the fate of the young Kennedy -- a man etched in American memory as three-year-old John-John, saluting the coffin of his murdered father, a wait that had occupied the thoughts of a nation and spurred an outpouring of grief and affection not seen in the United States since the death of Britain's Princess Diana.
From majestic St Patrick's Cathedral in New York to tiny white-painted wooden churches dotting the `Kennedy country' of Cape Cod and the eternal flame burning beside President John F Kennedy's grave at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, Americans prayed that the latest tragedy to befall the Kennedy family could somehow be miraculously reversed.
But as the hours went by, the miracle never came.
CoastGuard officials said that a person could survive for between 12 and 18 hours at the most in the cold Atlantic waters around Martha's Vineyard where the plane crashed.
Jerome Frechette of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said that recovering the wreckage of Kennedy's Piper Saratoga single-engined plane ``might take up to two weeks, it's hard to predict.''
He added that it could be six months to a year before the NTSB determined the cause of the accident.
Larrabee said that earlier reports by the Coast Guard that it had located an emergency underwater signal that might have come from the wrecked plane turned out to be a false alarm.
But he said the specially equipped radar ship, the Rude, was in the area and concentrating on two areas that might prove of interest and that divers would start work at daybreak.
A source close to the investigation told Reuters that a state police dive team has been sequestered at Menemsha coast guard station on Martha's Vineyard for most ofSunday, waiting for a go-ahead.
State police are now speculating that the plane went in nose first and broke up, the source said. The police do not expect to fund fuselage or human remains intact, the source added.
Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and her sister Lauren Bessette, 35, were flying from New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard on Friday night when their plane disappeared.
Kennedy, the publisher of George magazine, was piloting the single-engine six-seater in darkness without using any instrumentation -- a procedure that many veteran pilots said was fraught with risks.
He had his license for just over a year and had bought the advanced Piper Saratoga only three months ago. Some news reports said that he had been reluctant to fly late at night but one of his party arrived at the airport in New Jersey late, forcing him to make the trip in partial darkness.
``Low flight time, night time. Everything was stacked against him,'' said Ernie Carnahan, an instructor with TradewindsInternational flight school in Fort Pierce, Florida, summing up the feelings of many veteran pilots.
The National Transportation Safety Board's chief investigator for the accident, Robert Pearce, said experts had discovered that the plane piloted by Kennedy made a sudden drop of 700 feet to 1,800 feet in 29 seconds just after 9:40 pm on Friday (6:10 am IST on Saturday) below the level than can be tracked by radar.
He refused to say whether this sudden drop was abnormal and added, ``Seven hundred feet in 29 seconds would relate to about 1,400 feet per minute which was within the airplane's capabilities.''
Aviation experts said that a fall of 700 feet in that time was on the margin of a controlled descent or a crash dive and that the descent appeared to have made too early if the plane was to land in the Vineyard's airport.
The NTSB's chief, James Hall, cautioned reporters that the cause of the accident might never be known. ``At this point, we do not know. We will not know for some time. There is evena possibility we will never know,'' he said.
President Bill Clinton sombrely offered his prayers for them on Sunday. Emerging from two days of seclusion at his Camp David retreat in Maryland, Clinton said, ``I want to express our family's support and offer our prayers and those of all Americans for John Kennedy Jr, his wife, Carolyn, her sister Lauren and to their fine families.''
Debris from the Kennedy plane -- including luggage and a prescription pill bottle -- was found at sea or washed up on shore on Saturday.
Little new debris had been found since then, indicating that much of the plane's wreckage has sunk to the bottom of the ocean around Martha's Vineyard, not far from Gay Head, the isolated island district where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis maintained a home for years and where her son and his sister, Caroline, often summered.
Tom Murphy, a corporate attorney from Springfield, Massachusetts, said he often saw Kennedy riding his bike on the beach road or driving a black Pontiac GTO convertible.``He's pretty close to washing up on his own beach -- there's something pathetic about that,'' Murphy said.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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